Drake Equation, What are your numbers?

It is possible to download the Drake Equation spreadsheet for use in Excel or similar software, from here :- The Drake Equation
What are your numbers for our Milky Way Galaxy? Here are mine, which I believe are minimalist :-
a) Number of stars formed per year = 7
b) Fraction of stars that form planets = 0.8
c) Average number of inhabitable planets per star = 2
d) Fraction of c where life emerges = 0.01
e) Fraction of d where intelligent life evolves = 0.01
f) Fraction of e capable of interstellar communication = 0.96
g) Number of years that f remain detectable = 50,000
Result is that the number of broadcasting civilisations in the Milky Way = 53.76
Frank Drakeā€™s belief is that the number is 1,000 which is regarded as low by his peers.
(In Excel if you wish to make some of the fields accept 3 decimal digits you can simply right click on those and use the Format option.)

So what is the average distance between these civilizations in a galaxy 100,000 LY in diameter?
How much radio wave power was this planet puttingout in 1950? At what distance could we detect that with our current technology?
psik

It is possible to download the Drake Equation spreadsheet for use in Excel or similar software, from here :- http://www.astrodigital.org/astronomy/drake_equation.html What are your numbers for our Milky Way Galaxy? Here are mine, which I believe are minimalist :- a) Number of stars formed per year = 7 b) Fraction of stars that form planets = 0.8 c) Average number of inhabitable planets per star = 2 d) Fraction of c where life emerges = 0.01 e) Fraction of d where intelligent life evolves = 0.01 f) Fraction of e capable of interstellar communication = 0.96 g) Number of years that f remain detectable = 50,000 Result is that the number of broadcasting civilisations in the Milky Way = 53.76 Frank Drake's belief is that the number is 1,000 which is regarded as low by his peers. (In Excel if you wish to make some of the fields accept 3 decimal digits you can simply right click on those and use the Format option.)
I think you are way high on line f. Earth has harbored intelligent life for at least hundreds of thousands of years, and we've only been capable of interstellar communication for a few decades. Humans almost died out 70,000 years ago, which shows that not all planets with intelligent life will develop interstellar communication capabilities. This equation does not take into account that we are separated by time as well as distance. According to my questionable math skills, the answer to Psikey's first question below is about 9,800 LY. Any relatively nearby civilizations would have to wait that long or longer to receive our signals, and there is no guarantee they would even be looking, or have an interest in looking for that matter. Further, if they are looking there is no guarantee they would recognize a signal, or that we would recognize a signal from them. There is a lot of background noise in the galaxy, and neither we nor they would know what the other is capable of receiving, recognizing and interpreting. I fear that if we do identify a signal as artificial we may never decipher it short of finding a school of Bablefish in our solar system.
It is possible to download the Drake Equation spreadsheet for use in Excel or similar software, from here :- http://www.astrodigital.org/astronomy/drake_equation.html What are your numbers for our Milky Way Galaxy? Here are mine, which I believe are minimalist :- a) Number of stars formed per year = 7 b) Fraction of stars that form planets = 0.8 c) Average number of inhabitable planets per star = 2 d) Fraction of c where life emerges = 0.01 e) Fraction of d where intelligent life evolves = 0.01 f) Fraction of e capable of interstellar communication = 0.96 g) Number of years that f remain detectable = 50,000 Result is that the number of broadcasting civilisations in the Milky Way = 53.76 Frank Drake's belief is that the number is 1,000 which is regarded as low by his peers. (In Excel if you wish to make some of the fields accept 3 decimal digits you can simply right click on those and use the Format option.)
I think you are way high on line f. Earth has harbored intelligent life for at least hundreds of thousands of years, and we've only been capable of interstellar communication for a few decades. Humans almost died out 70,000 years ago, which shows that not planets with intelligent life will develop interstellar communication capabilities. This equation does not take into account that we are separated by time as well as distance. According to my questionable math skills, the answer to Psikey's first question below is about 9,800 LY. Any relatively nearby civilizations would have to wait that long or longer to receive our signals, and there is no guarantee they would even be looking, or have an interest in looking for that matter. Further, if they are looking there is no guarantee they would recognize a signal, or that we would recognize a signal from them. There is a lot of background noise in the galaxy, and neither we nor they would know what the other is capable of receiving, recognizing and interpreting. I fear that if we do identify a signal as artificial we may never decipher it short of finding a school of Bablefish in our solar system. Good point we could be surrounded by messages for millennia, and not know it, not recognize it, as it could be in a form or modality that we have not considered and/or could not translate if we did.
It is possible to download the Drake Equation spreadsheet for use in Excel or similar software, from here :- http://www.astrodigital.org/astronomy/drake_equation.html What are your numbers for our Milky Way Galaxy? Here are mine, which I believe are minimalist :- a) Number of stars formed per year = 7 b) Fraction of stars that form planets = 0.8 c) Average number of inhabitable planets per star = 2 d) Fraction of c where life emerges = 0.01 e) Fraction of d where intelligent life evolves = 0.01 f) Fraction of e capable of interstellar communication = 0.96 g) Number of years that f remain detectable = 50,000 Result is that the number of broadcasting civilisations in the Milky Way = 53.76 Frank Drake's belief is that the number is 1,000 which is regarded as low by his peers. (In Excel if you wish to make some of the fields accept 3 decimal digits you can simply right click on those and use the Format option.)
I think you are way high on line f. Earth has harbored intelligent life for at least hundreds of thousands of years, and we've only been capable of interstellar communication for a few decades. Humans almost died out 70,000 years ago, which shows that not planets with intelligent life will develop interstellar communication capabilities. This equation does not take into account that we are separated by time as well as distance. According to my questionable math skills, the answer to Psikey's first question below is about 9,800 LY. Any relatively nearby civilizations would have to wait that long or longer to receive our signals, and there is no guarantee they would even be looking, or have an interest in looking for that matter. Further, if they are looking there is no guarantee they would recognize a signal, or that we would recognize a signal from them. There is a lot of background noise in the galaxy, and neither we nor they would know what the other is capable of receiving, recognizing and interpreting. I fear that if we do identify a signal as artificial we may never decipher it short of finding a school of Bablefish in our solar system. Good point we could be surrounded by messages for millennia, and not know it, not recognize it, as it could be in a form or modality that we have not considered and/or could not translate if we did.One of the points made in the movie Contact is that it's a pretty good assumption that any advanced civilization sending out messages intended to be picked up with send them in manner that's universal, i.e. mathematical. For example it would be in a form that's obviously not natural, then encoded first to indicate a basic alphabet of sorts, again mathematical in nature, and then build on that.

It is possible that there may be at least dozens of civilisations out there that are at least as advanced technologically as ourselves. They may indeed have take even longer than us to achieve interstellar communication but some will have had at least twice as long as us to do it. Thus they will be capable of interstellar communication and may be communicating, possibly several between each other. We just do not recognise the technology. The chances are that anything that is out there and ahead of us is not merely 100 years ahead of us but could be several million years ahead of us.

One of the points made in the movie Contact is that it's a pretty good assumption that any advanced civilization sending out messages intended to be picked up with send them in manner that's universal, i.e. mathematical. For example it would be in a form that's obviously not natural, then encoded first to indicate a basic alphabet of sorts, again mathematical in nature, and then build on that.
A few years ago our astronomy club hosted a UT grad student who was working on his PhD. His dissertation argued that even if we receive a signal from an alien civilization we will a) not recognize it as such and b) have no way to interpret the message. He spent 45 minutes building a good case why these points are true. I've read a lot of essays by prominent astronomers who propose universal signals, but the underlying assumption is their math will closely match ours. That is anthropomorphic thinking, but still may be true. The bigger problem is even receiving a signal. Any such signal will have to be very strong at its origin, aimed precisely at us and repeated long enough for us to recognize it as artificial. Considering the volume of space were are talking about this is extremely unlikely.
A few years ago our astronomy club hosted a UT grad student who was working on his PhD. His dissertation argued that even if we receive a signal from an alien civilization we will a) not recognize it as such and b) have no way to interpret the message. He spent 45 minutes building a good case why these points are true. I've read a lot of essays by prominent astronomers who propose universal signals, but the underlying assumption is their math will closely match ours. That is anthropomorphic thinking, but still may be true. The bigger problem is even receiving a signal. Any such signal will have to be very strong at its origin, aimed precisely at us and repeated long enough for us to recognize it as artificial. Considering the volume of space were are talking about this is extremely unlikely.
I think there are certain universalities in math that could be possible markers of signals from other intelligent technologically advanced life like the Fibonacci sequence, if we see a signal based on that then we should start getting excited for instance. Then as you say we come to the vast distances for any signal to cross, all the background noise and loss of power. It would require enough photons to reach a receiver to create a coherent signal, something that is going to be very challenging.

How far out could the 1953 ā€˜I love Lucyā€™ get whilst still being capable of interpretation and then how much further could it get whilst just being capable of being recognised as merely a signal with null content?
Of course the answer is absolute in terms of physics. But short of that absolute answer to some extent it depends upon the receiving technology being much more sensitive than our equivalent, such that a very weak and barely existing signal could be detected by highly advanced technology an extremely long way out there.

How far out could the 1953 'I love Lucy' get whilst still being capable of interpretation and then how much further could it get whilst just being capable of being recognised as merely a signal with null content?.
Probably not much farther than the edge of our solar system. Beyond that the inverse square law and interstellar noise will drown the signal.

Am in favor of raising the factor on line d well above 0.01.

Hey Darron, been too long since seeing your name come up around here. Gone but not forgotten.

I know you canā€™t hear this, but itā€™s still nice just to send a shout out into the universe on your behalf. For the hell of it.

Was nice knowing you.


@bodes, considering how fast simple life started here, guess Iā€™d have to agree with you on that.

The biggest problem we currently face is we limit ourselves to current science. I remind everyone that we should interpret claims that nothing can go faster than C as actually not meaning that, but really meaning that we cannot observe anything moving faster than C as long as we have no input faster than C for our observations. Similarly, if we did not have our sense of sight it would be likely that science might claim that nothing could go faster than the speed of sound. Of course, just because we could not detect motion faster than the speed of sound would not mean than that nothing could go faster than the speed of sound.

We must hope we will discover faster-than-light communication, and possibly faster-than-light motion; otherwise it is most likely we will never leave this place.

Yes, modern Science being just a few hundred years old undoubtedly means that there will still be many truly wonderful things that are yet to be discovered/realised by the scientists lucky enough to be the first to grasp/uncover/describe them.

The instantaneity of amplitude changes in quantum mechanical wavefunctions (presumed to be calculable & integratable across all of Space) may allow for information-transfer faster than the universal speed-of-light, and hence for supercomputing that would be truly astounding.

Ā 

Ā 

The biggest problem we currently face is we limit ourselves to current science. -- believe
What does that mean? To me, it means, we limit ourselves to what we currently know.

You canā€™t limit yourself to know something that is beyond your knowledge.

What does that mean? To me, it means, we limit ourselves to what we currently know.
What it means to me is that we limit ourselves to arbitrary limits in our philosophy of (our approach to) science.

One arbitrary limit, among several, is that the speed of light in a vacuum is constant. Accepting that the observed blue shift in light from distant stars indicates that light may slow down over very long distances (6 to 12 billion light years) might tell us that the universe was not expanding and not at an increasing rate that many years ago. It would also bring into question the idea of a big bang.

Light slowing down over time would also not violate the principle that there is no such thing as perpetual motion. Constant light speed requires acceptance of perpetual motion.

Red-shifting (of spectral atomic lines) is currently satisfactorily explained by the universal expansion model (consistent with the BB singularity presumption), but (and as with all scientific explanations for natural phenomena in every discipline of Science) youā€™re certainly welcome to peer-review publish any alternative explanation thatā€™s consistent with the observations made, and scientists worldwide will applaud the brilliance.

And as for perpetual motion, the classical high school Physics textbook illustration of an EM wave as being comprised of orthogonal vectors (electric & magnetic) ā€˜pumpingā€™ up-&-down (in seeming perpetuity) is merely a crude teaching device for beginning pupils.

Red-shifting (of spectral atomic lines) is currently satisfactorily explained by the universal expansion model (consistent with the BB singularity presumption) ...
And the expansion notion is based on the red shifting assuming that C is constant. If C slows expansion theory fails.

BB theory does not assume a beginning, only a continuation. Note that we have no evidence at all of any kind that anything we observe has an origin; everything (including life) that we observe can be seen to be a continuation. There is no scientific basis for entertaining the idea of a ā€œzero pointā€ for anything.

Of course vectors are only mathematical descriptions of an assigned cause, not physical things. Equally obvious is that an EM wave must indicate a dynamic physical presence in order for it to be able to cause a dynamic reaction in a physical detector. I believe that the only way we recognize for change to be caused in a physical (fermion) object is displacement by another physical (fermion) presence. Perhaps you can show how a change in a physical object can be initiated by a non-physical presence? The ghost in the machine?

BB theory does not assume a beginning, only a continuation. Note that we have no evidence at all of any kind that anything we observe has an origin; everything (including life) that we observe can be seen to be a continuation. There is no scientific basis for entertaining the idea of a ā€œzero pointā€ for anything.
Note, that your logic is utterly and fatally flawed. This universe started in a state of pure chaos, a chaotic state of dynamical quantum fields consisting of elementary sub-atomic particles, which required 380,000 years for the "inflationary epoch " to stabilize and allow the formation of the first atomic structures.
Roughly 380,000 years after the Big Bang, matter cooled enough for atoms to form during the era of recombination, resulting in a transparent, electrically neutral gas, according to NASA.
https://www.space.com/52-the-expanding-universe-from-the-big-bang-to-today.html#

And what pray tell, would that indicate as the continuation of anything that must have been causal to the beginning of this universe?

 

One gently corrected your first error up above regarding ā€œthe observed blue shift in light from distant starsā€ as regards the universal expansion model [blue-shifting is actually relevant to observations of the relative motion of certain specific astronomical objects (e.g., in binary star systems)]. Hopefully, an astronomer Member on here can jump in on this at this point.

The speed of light in a high school lab does slow down on it entering something like a pupilā€™s glass prism or water tank (e.g., when studying Refraction & Snellā€™s Law), but then it speeds right back up again on exiting (& right back up to c if it enters a vacuum again). So light coming from distant stars will slow down by a minuscule amount on it entering the optical density of our atmosphere; and the corrections for various effects like this are calculable & allowable for by astronomers. Itā€™s actually the ā€˜fingerprintā€™ atomic absorption and emission lines that one looks at in astronomical spectra in order to observe the red/blue shifting of light; for which the universal expansion theory is still the best explanation as regards the general red-shifting of EM coming from all directions on observing distant galaxies.

Regarding ā€˜continuation,ā€™ no-one yet knows what came before or led to the singularity at the BB event; & as regards Life, a rational explanation for its origin is fully expected to yield to Scienceā€™s grasp in time, but as for it being a ā€˜continuationā€™ of anything, such would presumably be of the laws of Physics & Chemistry, no?

Ā